Santa Claus Fund: Her life brightened by Santa Claus Fund during the Great Depression, one woman gives back

One Star reader recalls how the Santa Claus Fund helped her family during the Great Depression.

It was the height of the Depression and Margaret Sheppard-Bromberg’s family, like many others in Toronto, had fallen on hard times.

Her father, Marcel Warner, had lost his beloved printing business after the stock market crashed in 1929. Deaf and unable to find another job, he relied on government assistance to feed his wife, also deaf, and six daughters.

Those were the “dark days”, said Sheppard-Bromberg, now 88 and living in British Columbia. Though her parents did their best to hide their anxiety, she and her siblings had very little — hand-me-down clothes, rationed food, a few toys to play with after school.

But at Christmas, the girls never went without.

Each year, like magic, a stack of boxes would arrive at the family’s Toronto home just before Christmas. Each parcel, she said, was labelled with the sisters’ names and ages and brimmed with goodies of the day — hard candy, a puzzle, a doll, mittens and a pair of “horribly scratchy” woollen stockings to help keep off the chill.

“The arrival of those boxes just before Christmas was absolutely a lifesaver for our family,” said Sheppard-Bromberg of the gifts still delivered to children across the GTA today as part of the annual Toronto Star Santa Claus Fund. “We were just absolutely overjoyed and excited.”

Since the fund’s launch in 1906, needy children across the region receive gift boxes thanks to reader donations. This year, some 45,000 children will receive gift boxes if the Star can raise $1.6 million in donations.

It’s unknown how Sheppard-Bromberg and her sisters made it onto Santa Claus’ list all those years ago. She suspects a family friend or neighbour aware of the family’s situation made sure the girls were on the list of recipients.

“It just brought us so much joy . . . even in the hard times, there was something there,” she said.

Decades later, it’s a joy she has not forgotten.

The oldest surviving member of her immediate family, which eventually swelled to seven children, Sheppard-Bromberg sends a small donation to the Toronto Star Santa Claus Fund each year as a way to give back to a charity that helped her family through the worst of times.